Is salt good for your face?

byThe Beauty Brains

Stephanie says: My friend raves about Estee Lauder Idealist Micro-D Thermal Face Polisher so I looked up the ingredients. The first one listed is calcium chloride, which, apparently, is corrosive and is used to make bleu cheese. How can this be safe to use on your skin? My friend also wants to know if adding an eye dropper-full to a jar of her regular scrub would yield the same exfoliating results?

We’re not sure what calcium chloride does for cheese, (our guess is that it’s a protein cross-linking agent) but in this formula it functions as a gritty abrasive. And yes it can be corrosive if left in contact with metal surfaces, but in the context of a rinse-off facial scrub you don’t need to worry about that.

Salty scrub

Can you add calcium chloride to your regular scrub and save a ton of money? No, and here’s why. This Idealist product is basically a type of salt scrub. As the name implies, salt scrubs use salt crystals as exfoliating agents (sugar scrubs do the same with sugar.) Since salt dissolves in water, these scrubs have to be made with oil or some other anhydrous base. (Anhydrous just means “without water.”) In the case of this Idealist product, the formula is based cyclomethicone, a type of silicone, instead of water. But if you added calcium chloride to a regular water-based scrub, like St. Ives Apricot scrub, it would just dissolve and would have no benefit.

The Beauty Brains bottom line

This may be a perfectly fine product, but it’s really just a glorified salt scrub. The most important question in our mind is, is Idealist Thermal Face Polisher worth it’s $63 price tag?

Does anyone use expensive department stores brands, like Estee Lauder, instead of drug store brands? Leave a comment and share your experiences with the rest of the Beauty Brains community.